Ashley gritted her teeth and spied around in this house of love, peeping, seeking her husband, and though unaroused by the bumping and grinding going on just beneath her nose, she did not consider herself, in the slightest, a prude. This is not shocking, she thought, investigating, from a doorway, the snaky, writhing mass atop a fold-out sofa bed, looking for an identifiable limb. She taught an erotica-writing workshop, after all, regularly analyzing her students’ dirty clichés, condemning the use of the words “lips” and “folds” and “petals” when describing the vagina, forbidding any character’s mouth from forming into “a perfect O” of pleasure or surprise or delight, or into an O of anything, for that matter. As a class, they’d together dissected the anatomy of an orgasm, weighed the advantages of girth over length, of curved-to-the-left over curved-to-the-right.
Nonetheless, she was relieved to find Troy naked nowhere in the house. Instead, she walked in on him sound asleep alone in a pitch-dark sunroom, many overgrown plants, dead from winter, on the windowsills. She sat on the end of the daybed littered with tiny brittle leaves and pondered her insomnia. Sometimes, when she’d wake in the middle of the night with Troy out like a light beside her, she’d try to ease her anxiety by inventing a romance with a stranger. First she’d compose the man, stitching together a sexy Frankenstein’s monster of warmth and intellect, then she’d set the scene for seduction. But because she found nothing particularly erotic about infidelity, she’d have to mentally dissolve her marriage before allowing herself to be seduced by her fictional lover.
Sometimes she’d picture an ugly divorce, one that left her broke and embittered, and sometimes Troy would die—a fall from a ladder, a heart attack, a swift and efficient terminal disease. Then Ashley would imagine her reaction (a stern state of denial? Weeks of catatonia? A surprising, unspeakable sense of relief?) and the getting on with her life (move to a bigger city? Buy a house on a lake with the insurance money?), which involved several minutes of interior decorating: arranging lamps and loveseats, positioning new pieces of art on the walls. At some point, before consummating her relationship with Frankenstein’s monster, she’d fall asleep and would sleep the sleep of the dead until morning.
Troy’s fly was open. Another woman might have found the zipper’s exposed silver teeth to be accusatory. But Ashley realized his fly had probably been undone all night as he swaggered around. As Ashley reached over to zip him back up, he woke.
“Ashley,” he said, sitting up, touching a finger to the red line on her cheek.
Ashley took a long drink of her Campari, swishing it around on her tongue, questioning. “Those tablets,” she said.
“What?” he said.
“Do you remember those tablets that your teacher would give you in the fifth grade? You’d eat them, then they’d leave red streaks on your teeth if you hadn’t brushed good enough? I just realized that’s exactly what Campari reminds me of. It’s been bugging me all day.”
“Disclosing tablets,” he said. “That’s what they’re called.”
“How do you even know that? Oh, forget it, you know it because that’s what you do. You know things.” Ashley always riddled Troy with questions whenever she was writing. He somehow knew what kinds of birds you’d hear whistling on the coast of New Jersey, and the names of flowering weeds in Mississippi. Just ask him—he knew the extent of ruin a possum in the attic would create, and the kind of smoke a ten-year-old cigarette would make when finally lit, and the kind of pencil you would need to write words on glass. Without Troy, her characters would fumble around, as inept and ill equipped for life as she was herself.
Troy took a sip of her Campari. “Yep,” he said, “disclosing tablets. I’m suddenly seeing those film strips with pictures of smiling cartoon teeth brushing their own heads with toothpaste.”
“I bet you were one of those kids who always got to turn the knob on the film-strip projector,” Ashley said. “Remember that little beep you’d hear, so you knew when to advance the film? I’d have, like, this complete conditioned response to it. My heart would race, my hands would shake. And I always got behind or ahead, and the kids would yell at me.”
“Turning that knob is one of the great,” and he stopped a moment to wiggle his fingers in front of himself, squinting, trying to come up with the right word, “lost tactile memories of childhood. That and popping bubble wrap.”
“Or squirting glue on your hand and letting it dry, then peeling it off,” Ashley said.
“Sharpening crayons in the pencil sharpener.”
“That’s a good one,” Ashley said, feeling the turning of the handle in her wrist as the sharpener’s blades shaved the wax. They sat quietly, trying to think of more. Then Ashley said, “Why haven’t you asked about my banged-up face?”
“Peyton was here,” he said. “She told me you fell down the stairs.”
“I hope to god that Peyton didn’t see you . . . doing . . . anything . . .”
“No, god, of course not,” he said. “Ashley, are you kidding? I haven’t done anything. Do you really think I would’ve been doing anything? I only came here by myself because I would’ve just worried about you all night if you’d come along. All Peyton saw was me having a conversation. I’d been playing a drinking game earlier, and came up here to pass out. It’s stupid. I’ve been stupid. I haven’t taken a single note, and I won’t remember anything. I’m never going to have a book to write.”
“Well, you never have paid good enough attention,” she said. “You talk, you don’t listen.” What she wanted to say next she could feel in her throat, could feel it making her salivate and her hands shake, that old fifth grade film-strip-beep feeling. “You’re having an aff—” she started, just as he said something too. They both stopped midsentence. “Go ahead,” she said.
“No, you go,” he said. “What?”
“I don’t know if I can say it again without throwing up,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t hear me?”
“I didn’t hear you,” he said, though the sheepish tone in his voice suggested that he had indeed heard her, and that he was offering her one last shot at avoiding the topic forever.
“I think you’re having an affair,” she said.
“No,” he said. “No. No. No. No.” He gave each no its own distinct melody and facial expression, like he was rehearsing a line in front of a mirror. The first no was a no of disappointment; the second one, shock; the third, confusion; fourth, coddling; and, fifth, he pedaled right back to his first instinct, disappointment, and added a pinch of offense. Combined, all the no’s spelled out, to Ashley, one big fat lying cheating yes.
“I guess, in this situation, the next thing you’re supposed to ask is, ‘Who is it?’” she said. “So. That’s what I’m asking.”
Troy rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and chewed on the thumbnail of his other. “I won’t see her again,” he said.
“Oh god oh god oh god,” Ashley said, setting her drink on the floor and standing, pacing, shaking her hands in front of herself like she was trying to quick-dry her nail polish. “Don’t admit it. You’re admitting it. Why are you admitting it?”
“I don’t have to,” he started. “I mean, I’m not really admitting anything if you don’t want me to. I mean, I’ll say what you need me to say.”
“I need you to tell the truth. Above everything, right now, I just think we really need the complete and absolute truth here.”
“Okay, if that’s . . .”
“Shhhhh,” she interrupted. “And I need the truth to be that you’re not having an affair.”
“Well, then, that . . . that’s the truth.”
“Which is?”
“The last thing you just said. Whatever the truth is that you wanted, is the truth that I’m telling you.”
“So, Troy,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, “is it that you were born without a spine, or did you have it surgically removed at some point? Or was it ripped raw right out of your asshole?”
Troy sighed, rolled his eyes, and seemed just about to give back as good as he’d gotten, which most likely would’ve only led them down a snide, destructive, and catty path, so it was probably best, Ashley quickly realized, that they were interrupted by the shrill, deafening bleat of a hallway smoke detector.
Outside, in front of the house, a drag queen, microphone in one hand, a cigarette in the other, mascara running down his craggy, clown-white face like streaks of pollution on marble, his tights painted with varicose veins, sat on the karaoke machine, treating the other queens on the lawn to the love theme from Titanic. Ashley saw no fire, only heavy smoke. Men and women in various stages of undress, or wrapped in sheets, or clutching pillows to their naked chests and private parts, tumbled from the front door coughing and wheezing. Some of them, on the verge of asphyxiation, dropped onto the lawn to squirm, inadvertently creating apocalyptic-looking snow angels.
Ashley stepped among the partygoers, looking for Deedee and counting heads, making sure all her friends got out okay. Most of her Sugar Shop guests weren’t even feeling the cold, still loud and laughing as they danced to their cars, some of them even kicking along in a conga line.
Troy had sped Ashley from the house, telling her to hold tissues to her face as he put his arms around her and guided her through the smoke-filled hallway. Now, on the front lawn, he took off his shirt to wrap it around a fiftysomething woman who’d somehow managed to escape from the house looking elegant and only slightly put out, naked but for a pair of sunglasses and hot-pink strappy sandals, holding an unspilled martini complete with twist on the rim. It annoyed Ashley that circumstance allowed Troy to be heroic.
The singing queen wore a black cocktail dress similar to Ashley’s. After finishing Titanic with gusto, he embarked on the theme from The Poseidon Adventure. Ashley dabbed at her own cheeks, which she realized must be streaked with mascara too. Across the lawn, Troy helped a dizzy couple into their car—the man’s shirt was buttoned unevenly, his belt unbuckled, the woman’s dress unzipped down the back. Bobble-headed and gasping, the couple sped off, squealing their tires.
“My god, Ashley,” Deedee said, suddenly there, “eeek.” She licked her thumb and began rubbing at Ashley’s face. “Have you been bawling your eyes out?”
“No,” was all Ashley said.
Word had already spread among the evacuees that the evening’s arsonist was a woman who’d shut herself in a bedroom closet as her husband had sex in the master bath with two women and two men, five people in a four-person whirlpool tub. With her Bic, she’d lit the lace of a feather-light peignoir. She now sat in her minivan, on her cell phone, confessing to police.
“Let’s go before the fire trucks block us in,” Deedee said.
“You go,” Ashley said. “I need to talk to Troy. Wait’ll you hear this: he basically admitted to having an affair.”
“Oh, Ashley,” Deedee said. “Goddammit. Well, you need to go to him right now and let him know he’s not responsible for any of this,” gesturing toward Ashley’s face and down the front of her dress, wincing, “the welt, and the mascara, and the ripped hose. Don’t give him an inkling that he’s the reason you look like such shit. It’ll just feed his ego.”
Though Deedee insisted on waiting for Ashley in the car, Ashley insisted that Deedee go home. Ashley simply couldn’t listen to another word of advice, not from a friend or family member, not from Sybil the Guru or a magazine article. All the marital aids, whether in the form of sex toys or self-help seminars, were just a parade of the blind leading the blind. In the end, all there was to guide you was what little sense you had.
“I’m not crying if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ashley said, walking right up to Troy. He stood near a woman got up in a French maid’s uniform who seemed to be feather-dusting ashes from the ruffles. “The smoke, is all.”
He raised his chin and clucked his tongue, and she knew he was about to slip into a few tuneless bars of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She put a quick kibosh on that, shaking her head and holding her finger to his lips to shush him.
“You’re probably freezing to death,” he said, reaching out to rub her bare arms.
“Where’d we go, Troy?” she said. “I mean, what . . .” Then she stopped. The fact that she was a writer was ridiculous, words so often failing her left and right.
“We didn’t go anywhere,” he said. “If, when you say where did we go, what you mean is what happened to those two kids who were so in love, so in love they got married and started having babies only months after meeting each other. . . . I don’t think we were even old enough to drink. . . . If that’s what you mean, then we didn’t go anywhere. We’re exactly the same as we were. The same couple of sweet dummies are right here. I’m the same as I was twenty years ago, mostly. And you’re that same prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Troy, I’m going to go home. And I can’t have you there for . . . well, I at least need to get away from you for the rest of the night. So you should go to a hotel, or . . . oh, I don’t care. Go wherever you’ve got to go. But not home.”
“You can’t break up with me, Ashley. If we break up, the kids’ll hate us.”
“They kind of already do.”
“No, they don’t. They love us madly. They just want us to think they hate us so we’ll work harder to get them to love us more.”
“You know all the angles,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know anything. I need you around so I know what’s what.”
“Call me tomorrow, maybe,” she said. Ashley had to turn and walk away before she became sentimental. A few more minutes of his gorgeous, pathetic regret and she’d be sniveling in his arms.
“Ashley,” he said, following her.
“I need to be alone, Troy,” she said.
“I can be alone with you.”
Ashley shook her head and raised her hand and kept walking. He would have to work harder to woo her back. She needed extravagant gestures at this point, like a truckload of flowers delivered to her door or an embarrassing, very public serenade beneath her window. She needed all the predictable love stuff, the sappier the better—cliché-ridden messages on heart-shaped balloons, stuffed toy monkeys that kissed with magnetic lips. Boxes of Godiva, an antique book of love poems, mix CDs, an overpriced, barely-there negligee. For now, she needed him to assure her that love wasn’t complex, that the two of them were not above tradition. For at least a short while, there needed to be no over-thinking.
After walking for only a block, Ashley felt numb from the cold. But when she tried to call a cab, she saw that her cell phone’s charge had run down. She turned around to look back at the house, where a few emergency vehicles now sat, their dancing red lights adding to the circus. They’ll find me, she thought, frozen blue in my party dress, mere feet from a house on fire.
If she ran back to Troy now, allowing him to rescue her and to begin his begging for forgiveness ahead of schedule, would that be so defeating? The evening was an extreme one, after all.
But she knew she couldn’t return to her husband just now, unless it was to deliver her knee to his groin, or to drive the heel of her shoe into his foot, or to say something pithy and quotable like scorned women do in movies, provoking applause from the audience and celebratory hoots of mob justice. Ashley loved the vicarious thrill of such moments at the theater, when you feel the tension in your own fist, your lips trembling with empathetic rage, then thwack!, she lets the bastard have it. In life, however, belittling and/or assaulting your husband failed to have the same appeal.
Ashley continued on her trek away from the party. Beyond the front gates of the housing development, perhaps she’d find a convenience store with a phone. Because maybe it wasn’t reconciliation that she wanted. She could see herself unmoored, at ease but adrift, basking in the sympathy of her friends.
A white stretch limo pulled up to the side of the street. “Do you want to get raped?” one of the drag queens shouted from the window. He asked his question with such game-show-host bravado and cheer that it sounded more like an invitation than a warning. “You shouldn’t be out walking alone.” The queen opened the door wide for Ashley.
“I live way downtown,” Ashley said. “Maybe you could just call me a cab.”
“You’re Lee’s mother,” one of the queens said. “Get your skinny little ass in.”
The limo was long enough for all the long-legged men to stretch out luxuriously. Ashley scooted in between a Tina Turner and a stubble-chinned Liz Taylor in her Maggie the Cat slip, and accepted a flute of champagne.
“Don’t worry if you spill it, sugar, it’s cheap as sin,” said one queen in a bedazzled flesh-tone dress like the one Marilyn Monroe had worn to sing to JFK. His face was heavily made up, but he wore no wig. His bald head was patchy with psoriasis.
“How’d you get the limo so quick?” Ashley asked.
“We’ve got Jimmy Ritalin up there on speed-dial,” Marilyn said, gesturing toward the young, angel-faced chauffeur.
“So how do you know Lee so well?” she asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer, but she couldn’t keep from asking. “How do you know I’m his mother?”
“Oh, Mrs. Allyson, you don’t recognize me, do you?” said a man in an opalescent pleather minidress and spidery eyelashes that looked too heavy for his lids to lift. “I’m Stubby! Used to live down the street from you. Used to be so fat. I babysat Lee and Peyton. Now I own a comic-book shop where Lee hangs out sometimes. Your boy is going to be so famous, Mrs. Allyson. He’s so talented. Do you know that? Do you realize how insanely talented he is?”
“Lee has more talent in the tip of his little tiny pinkie,” said Tina Turner, “than I’ve got in my whole tongue.”
“Where did he learn to illustrate so beautifully?” asked a much older man, with an English accent, in a yellow polyester pantsuit with Swiss dots. He twisted his string of pearls around his finger.
“He just,” Ashley began, “he just always has.” She was taken by surprise, not by the fact of Lee’s talent but that so many others would be so aware of it.
“He’s been making a mini-comic about our exploits,” Stubby said. “Oh, it’s splendidly filthy.”
“His work is very striking,” the Brit said, “but he needs to venture further from the manga influence. Accentuate his own style. I loaned him a bunch of the Tijuana Bibles I’ve collected, to try to get him to bring a more primitive, rougher edge to the work. But his art will be in a gallery someday, I know it. And published. He’ll be highly respected.”
“The comic is called Those Fabulous Bastards of Omaha,” Stubby said, “and in it we have a live-sex stage act called ‘Bedraggled.’ Isn’t that clever?”
“Has a single one of you trashy little whores ever even heard of decorum?” Liz Taylor said between gritted teeth. “Maybe Mrs. Allyson here doesn’t want to be privy to all the vulgarity.”
“Oh, poo-poo dat, bitch. Mrs. Allyson is a novelist,” Stubby said. “She’s cool with it all. You’re cool, right?”
“Yeah,” Ashley said. “Yeah, I’m cool,” and she began to cry with a mix of exhaustion and pride. Ever since Lee had announced that he was gay, Ashley had been too troubled to notice anything else about him. Of course Lee’s work should be in a gallery. And Ashley should’ve been the first one to tell him that.
She wouldn’t cry for Lee anymore, she decided. But couldn’t she at least shed a few tears for Naomi? Leaving the apartment that night, Naomi had looked just right for him, despite her ill-fitting cast-off prom dress and the wires poking through the petals of the cloth daisies of her dusty wrist corsage. The poor girl, blushing as Lee put his arm around her waist to pull her close, to kiss her cheek, had been the picture of optimism and despair.
The men all leaned toward Ashley to attend to her as she cried, offering tissues, and cooing, and refilling her glass of champagne. Marilyn poured some bubbly onto her silk scarf and began to wipe away Ashley’s lines of mascara. Stubby took out a makeup kit and went to work on concealing her welt, then re-blushing her cheeks. Tina Turner teased Ashley’s hair with a pick and lacquered it high with a purse-sized can of fruit-scented hairspray.
“Lee should put the party in the comic book,” Marilyn said, leading the queens to discuss plot points as they fussed over Ashley.
“Bedraggled could be performing at the big Sex Ball of West O,” Stubby said.
“When a disco inferno sparks up,” the Brit said.
“And we have to risk life and limb to rescue all the burning trash,” Liz Taylor said.
To clear her mind of the harsh realities of the evening, Ashley closed her eyes to watch Lee’s pictures spring to life in glorious Technicolor. She knew exactly how he’d illustrate the fire, each lick of flame an elegant curlicue of orange and yellow. He’d capture all the drag queens’ clever damage, but he’d give it some glamour. One drag queen’s shapely leg would taper off into the knife-sharp pointy toe of a narrow shoe, another queen would have a towering Marie Antoinette powdered wig that leaned to the left. One would wear a see-through baby-doll nightie, his tucked penis partially visible in transparent panties. There wouldn’t be a single falsie among them, all their breasts fantasy made flesh. No matter how raucous his tale, Lee would give these gentle men unique beauty, showing them a strange kindness they deserved.
A chubby geisha girl with a Harley rider’s handlebar mustache, who’d been sitting silently up front with Jimmy Ritalin, passed his parasol back to Ashley as they pulled up to the curb in the Old Market. The snow had started up again, even slushier than before, but still people milled up and down the streets, from bar to bar.
Ashley was surprised to realize it wasn’t even yet eleven-thirty, and seeing such night activity made her feel a little less lost. After swapping a passel of air kisses with the queens, Ashley stepped from the limo and decided to walk down to La Buvette to drink alone in the hour or so before closing.
Beneath the papery parasol, Ashley thought about a night downtown at the opera a year ago, a production of Madama Butterfly with women wearing polka-dotted kimonos in bright, nautical blues, reds, yellows. Ashley had fallen in love with the whole spectacle, could still see the polka dots shimmying with the ginger steps the many geishas took. A little girl played Butterfly’s little boy, every movement well oiled, and Ashley had become mesmerized as she’d gazed through her antique opera glasses, the child performing like an incredibly brilliant monkey zipped into a child’s costume.
Anne and Phil, who’d been waiting tables at La Buvette for years, didn’t at first recognize Ashley with her makeover, and Ashley decided she liked the disguise of it. Phil told Ashley her hair was “dramatic.” Just last week, Ashley had accidentally knocked over a fifty-dollar bottle of French champagne with her eighteen-dollar fake Birkin bag, but Anne hadn’t made her pay for it, so Ashley ordered the same brand of champagne tonight. “To Anne and Phil,” she said, raising her flute, “who freshen my drinks and are always good to me.”
Ashley sat at the table at the window to watch the people out in the cold and the wet. She knew she’d be up all night inventing the confrontations she’d have with Troy, taking both his part and her own in her mind. Her husband would have her manner of speaking, and he’d end up whispering in her ear all the things she most needed him to say. But for now, feeling drunk, and eased by the flicker of candles, she considered her next novel, which she realized needed to be operatic, not the tiny tale of little lives and small worlds she’d been working on.
She thought she might write about Omaha at the turn of the century—not the most recent turn but the one before that—when the city was mired in political corruption, the streets polluted with child whores turning tricks in tents. The Old Market had consisted of fruit warehouses then, evidenced still by the hooks in the ceiling of La Buvette from which bunches of bananas had once hung. Those fabulous bastards of Omaha could be characters in her book, their hoop skirts and ostrich-feather fans on fire as the city burned, or quaked, or drowned, like some greater city somewhere else.
Ashley was glad she lived just around the corner and wouldn’t have to risk catastrophe by driving home. She sometimes felt on the verge of developing a crippling, irrational fear of something mundane, like riding in a car or crossing a street. She could easily imagine herself phobic, stunned to complete stillness on an ordinary day.
The window became too wet and slicked with ice for Ashley to make out anything but the halos of streetlamps and headlights, so her focus switched from the life outside to the glass. On the windowpane was the press of lips, an imprint of a kiss left behind. She touched her finger to the ghost of the bottom lip and accidentally wiped part of it away. Maybe someone had passed by outside whom someone inside had loved. Loving someone is childish, she’d read in a book. There was truth to it. What you felt when you fell in love was a melancholy burn of nostalgia. If love didn’t always begin with the threat of ending, she realized, it probably wouldn’t be worth much to us at all.